Daily Story

Every summer for several years, a Dutch professor of mathematics crossed to England for his holidays. He stayed in the village of Hever, at the home of a cousin of the woman he had come to work with.
He had first seen her work in a set of photographs. They showed cardboard models, carefully made, of shapes that cannot be built in our world at all.

The professor was Pieter Hendrik Schoute, of the University of Groningen. The woman was Alicia Boole Stott, a wife and mother with no formal education, living on a very small income.

She had found her way into the fourth dimension on her own.
Her story began in Cork, Ireland, where she was born in 1860. Her father was George Boole, the mathematician whose system of logic would one day help make computers possible.

He died when she was four.
Her mother, Mary, moved to London with four of the five daughters to find work. Alicia was left behind in Cork, raised partly by her grandmother and partly by a great-uncle. These were unhappy years for her.

She was 11 when she rejoined her mother and sisters in London. Home was a cramped, dark lodging. There was no money for schooling in the usual sense.

What there was, instead, was her mother's teaching. Mary Boole believed children should discover ideas for themselves, by handling real shapes and working out what they meant.

Then a visitor brought the cubes.
Charles Howard Hinton, the son of the man Mary Boole worked for, arrived with a great many small wooden cubes. He gave the youngest girls a list of Latin names for them and asked them to stack them into shapes. Hinton was fascinated by the idea of a fourth dimension. At least one of her sisters found the game a bore.

Alicia, at about 18, did not.
To picture what she was attempting, think of a cube. A square is its flat, two-dimensional cousin. A four-dimensional shape is to a cube roughly what a cube is to a square. No one can build one, but it can be studied by its slices, the way a loaf is understood by cutting it.

Working with nothing but the ruler-and-compass methods of ancient Greek geometry, Alicia worked out that there are exactly six regular four-dimensional shapes. Then she drew the three-dimensional slices of each one, as it would pass through our space, and built cardboard models of those slices by hand.

She had never been taught the algebra that professional mathematicians used for such problems. She did it by seeing.
Here is a detail often left out. It is to Alicia Boole Stott that English owes the word "polytope," the name for these higher-dimensional shapes. A self-taught young woman in a London lodging gave a whole branch of geometry its everyday name in English.

Life moved on. She took secretarial work near Liverpool, and in 1890 she married Walter Stott, an actuary. They had two children, Mary and Leonard, and money was always tight.
It was through her husband that she learned, in 1895, that Schoute was studying the same slices of the same shapes. She sent him photographs of her models.

Schoute was astonished, and soon he was on his way to England.
Their partnership lasted almost 20 years. He persuaded her to publish, and her papers appeared in Amsterdam, some under her name alone and some written with him.

Even then, she described herself modestly. In a 1911 letter, she wrote that she had been busy "staining very shabby floors" and other household jobs, and that she was a duffer at the algebraic side of mathematics.

Schoute died in 1913. The following year, the University of Groningen awarded her an honorary doctorate, as part of its 300th anniversary. She was 54. For reasons that are not clear, she did not travel to receive it, and the degree was conferred in her absence.
Around 1930, she met the young geometer Donald Coxeter, who would become one of the century's great experts on these shapes. He called her Aunt Alice. They wrote to each other, visited for what they called tea and polytopes, and once gave a joint talk at Cambridge, where she brought her models and gave them to the department.

When Coxeter left for Canada in 1936, she sent him an antique stained-glass lampshade shaped like one of the classical solids.

She died in 1940.
Six shapes. A teenager with a box of cubes had found every one of them, and spent a lifetime showing what they looked like from inside our world.
If you have ever understood something deeply long before anyone thought to ask what you knew, you already know how she spent those years.

Her cardboard models are held today at the University Museum in Groningen, where her honorary degree was granted. Colored drawings of hers were found there in 2001.

The job of the two men in the U.S. Park Police helicopter sounded straightforward and was very hard to do. Hold the aircraft low over the ice-choked Potomac River. Lower a line to the people in the water. Pull them out one at a time.

The pilot was Donald Usher. The paramedic beside him was Melvin "Gene" Windsor.

On the afternoon of 13 January 1982, they did that job again and again.

Below them, a handful of survivors clung to wreckage in the freezing river. Minutes earlier, Air Florida Flight 90 had taken off from Washington National Airport in a heavy snowstorm. It failed to climb, struck the 14th Street Bridge, and plunged through the ice.

There were 79 people aboard.
Only five would come out of that river alive.

Among the people in the water was a man in his forties. When the line came within his reach, he caught it and passed it to someone else.

The helicopter carried that person to the riverbank, then came back.
He passed it on again.
When the crew finally returned for him, he was gone.

For a long time, no one knew who he had been. Newspapers and television called him the man in the water. Time magazine published an essay about him before anyone could put a name to it.

His name was Arland D. Williams Jr.
He was 46.

He had grown up in Mattoon, Illinois, where friends in high school called him Chub. He graduated from The Citadel, the military college in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1957. By 1982 he was a bank examiner for the Federal Reserve, based in Atlanta, and the father of a son and a daughter.

Then came the river.

Here is what most retellings leave out: identifying him took about 18 months. Five people had been pulled from the Potomac, and the passenger who kept giving away the line had vanished with the wreckage. Only after a Coast Guard investigation, completed in June 1983, could officials say with confidence that the man in the water was Arland Williams.

At the White House that same month, President Ronald Reagan presented the Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal to his family. His parents, his son, his daughter and his sister stood in the Oval Office to receive it. In his remarks, Reagan said Williams had been trapped in the wreckage by a jammed seat belt, and that he had repeatedly handed the line to others he believed were worse off than he was.

By that account, he was not weighing danger from a safe distance. He was held fast, injured and in freezing water when he made his choice.

Most of the people on Flight 90 never had a chance to make any choice at all. Of the 79 aboard, 74 died.
He was not the only one who risked the Potomac for a stranger that day. Lenny Skutnik, a government worker watching from the shore, jumped into the icy water to pull an exhausted survivor to safety. Usher and Windsor kept flying back over the river until there was no one left to reach.

But only one of the people in the water held the line and kept handing it away.

The country did not forget.
One of the spans of the 14th Street Bridge, the bridge the plane had struck, was renamed in his honor. It is now the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge.

In 2000, The Citadel created a society in his name to honor graduates who perform acts of extraordinary heroism. His classmates from 1957 established a professorship at the college devoted to the study of heroism. In 2003, an elementary school in Mattoon was named for him.

The five who came out of the river went on with their lives.
If you have ever let someone else go first when you needed help just as badly, you already understand a little of what he chose in that water.

His portrait hangs at The Citadel. And every day, traffic crosses the Potomac on a bridge that carries his name, close to where the man in the water gave away his place.

She could pray in Irish long before she could speak English.
Kathleen Rita McNulty was born on 12 February 1921 in Feymore, near the village of Creeslough in County Donegal. Irish was the language of her home.

That same night, during Ireland's War of Independence, her father was arrested at the house. He was held in Derry Jail until January 1922, when he was released and the charges were dropped.
The family's future lay across the Atlantic. Her father went ahead in 1923 and built a house in Wyndmoor, on the edge of Philadelphia.

The rest of the family followed. They arrived in New York aboard the SS Columbia on 13 October 1924.

She was three.
English came at school. By 1930 the McNultys lived at 48 Highland Avenue in Chestnut Hill, with six children, two uncles and two lodgers under one roof.

She graduated from Hallahan High School, a Catholic girls' school, in 1938. Chestnut Hill College for Women offered her a scholarship.
Her reason for choosing mathematics was practical. She later explained that she needed good grades to keep the scholarship, and mathematics came easiest.

Then she found she loved it.
She did not want to teach, so she took business as her minor. She graduated in 1942, in the middle of the Second World War.
An advertisement asked for mathematics graduates. The University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering was hiring for war work.

She applied, and they took her on. She was 21.
Her official title was "computer."
In those years, that word meant a person. She and dozens of other young women calculated the paths of artillery shells, so that firing tables could tell gunners how to aim.

The tools were desk calculators driven by electric motors. Every result had to be written down by hand and keyed back in for the next step.

By her own account, one trajectory took 30 to 40 hours at a desk. Each gun needed a full table of them.
In the same school, two engineers, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, were building a machine meant to do this work electronically. It was called ENIAC.
Then the work changed shape.

Six women from the computing group were chosen to make the machine run. Kay McNulty was one of them, alongside Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman and Frances Bilas.

Here is what most people miss: there was no manual.
Programming ENIAC did not mean typing instructions. The women studied the machine's diagrams and set up each problem by hand, breaking equations into tiny steps and routing each one to the right unit in the right order.

The machine could carry out many operations at once. Every number had to arrive exactly when the next step needed it.
ENIAC was shown to the public on 15 February 1946.

The women who had learned to make it work were not presented as its programmers. According to historian Linde Lunney, they were cast as hostesses at the launch, and official reports left them out.
Kay later put her wartime job plainly. ENIAC, she said, had made her, one of the first "computers," obsolete.

On 7 February 1948, she married John Mauchly.
He was a widower with two young children and 14 years her senior. Her parents objected and did not attend the wedding.
Her mother came to visit only after the first grandchild was born.

Kay raised seven children: five of her own and two stepchildren. On the family farm in Ambler, Pennsylvania, she also kept working on programs for the computers her husband went on to design, BINAC and UNIVAC.

That work went largely uncredited.
John Mauchly died in 1980.
For years afterward, she spoke about ENIAC at meetings and celebrations. She later said she always spoke as John's widow, telling his story rather than her own.

In 1985 she married the photographer Severo Antonelli.
The change came at a talk at Princeton. She shared the stage with Kathe Jacoby and Jean Bartik, another of the original six.
She later described it as the first time she spoke for herself.
She and Jean Bartik went on to give many talks together, at universities and at companies including IBM and Microsoft.

Recognition followed. In 1997 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, and Chestnut Hill College, which had once given her a scholarship, awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli died on 20 April 2006 in Wyndmoor, the same district where her father had built the family's first American home.

She was 85.
If you have ever done the careful work behind someone else's big moment, and watched the credit go elsewhere, you already know what Kay McNulty carried.

In Creeslough, a plaque carries her name, unveiled by her granddaughter in 2023. At Dublin City University, a computer science building carries it too.
Both stand in the country she left at three.

Some Nevada schoolchildren met each week to learn the constellations from books.
The club had been one girl's idea.
Her name was Nancy Grace Roman.
She was 11.

She had been born in Nashville, Tennessee, in May 1925. Her father was a geophysicist, and his work kept the family moving: Oklahoma, Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, Nevada. Her mother taught music. Roman later credited both parents with sparking her interest in science.

By high school, she knew she wanted to be an astronomer.
Not everyone around her agreed.

She later recalled asking her high school counsellor in Baltimore if she could take a second year of algebra instead of Latin. As she remembered it, the counsellor asked her: "What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?"

She took the mathematics.
She went through an accelerated programme at Western High School and graduated in three years.

At Swarthmore College, she worked at the college's Sproul Observatory and earned her degree in astronomy in 1946. Three years later, she completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago.

She stayed on at the university's Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, sometimes travelling to the McDonald Observatory in Texas to work with the astronomer W. W. Morgan.

Her research there was solid and original. She studied how the chemical makeup of stars related to the way they move through our galaxy. She also noticed, by luck, that the light of a star called AG Draconis had changed dramatically since earlier observations. She later said that discovery did a great deal to raise her profile.

But a research career at the university had a ceiling.
At that time, a woman had very little chance of winning a permanent, tenured research post there. In 1955, she left.
She moved to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and took up radio astronomy, rising to head its microwave spectroscopy section.

Then a single conversation changed the direction of her life.
At a lecture, she was approached by an official named Jack Clark. NASA was new. He asked if she knew anyone who might set up a programme for astronomy from space.

She took that as an invitation to apply.
In 1959, she became NASA's first Chief of Astronomy. She was the first woman to hold an executive post at the space agency.

She was in her early thirties.
Astronomy from space barely existed. There was no programme to inherit. She built one.

She travelled to university astronomy departments across the country to explain what NASA was planning. She asked astronomers what they wanted to observe, and she explained what a telescope above the atmosphere could see that no telescope on the ground ever could.

Over the years, she oversaw satellites that studied the Sun, ultraviolet light, X-rays and the shape of the Earth. She also planned research flown on rockets and on the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab missions.

And she began work on the biggest project of all.
A large telescope in orbit.

Here is what most people miss: Hubble needed far more than good engineering. It needed money, and it needed astronomers to agree on what it should be. Roman set up the committees that shaped it and helped organise the scientific community behind it. Ed Weiler, who later served as NASA's chief scientist for Hubble, credited her with helping to sell the telescope and with organising the astronomers whose case eventually persuaded Congress to fund it.
That is why she became known as the "Mother of Hubble."
She left NASA in 1979, after 21 years at the agency.

Hubble had not yet flown.
She went on working as a contractor supporting NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center until 1997.

On 24 April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope finally launched. It went on to change what people everywhere knew about the universe.

Roman continued to speak to students and encourage young women to study science for the rest of her life.
She died on 25 December 2018.
She was 93.

Two decades at NASA, and much of that time spent on a telescope she would never operate herself.
In 2020, NASA announced that its next major space observatory would carry her name.
If you have ever spent years building something you knew someone else would get to use, you already know what Nancy Grace Roman carried.

The Hubble Space Telescope is still in orbit above the Earth. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on 30 August 2026, and right now it is travelling to its observing post, about a million miles from home.

The first pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope came back blurry.
It was 1990. The telescope had been launched that April after years of delay and great expectations. Its main camera was supposed to see the universe more sharply than any telescope on the ground.
Instead, its images of stars looked smeared.

Among the scientists studying those images was an astronomer from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was part of the team working with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera.
Her name was Sandra Faber.
She was 45.

She and her team helped diagnose what had gone wrong. Hubble's main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape by a tiny margin, producing a flaw called spherical aberration. Light from the edges of the mirror and light from its center came to focus at slightly different points.

On June 27, 1990, NASA announced the problem publicly.
It was a hard result to deliver. But naming the flaw precisely was the first step toward fixing it.

Engineers designed corrective optics with the opposite flaw built in, like a pair of glasses for the telescope. In December 1993, astronauts installed them. Hubble's vision was restored.
By then, Faber had spent two decades being the person who looked carefully when others hoped for a simpler answer.
Her path had not started smoothly.

Sandra Moore was born in Boston in December 1944 and finished high school in Pittsburgh. She studied physics at Swarthmore College, where astronomer Sarah Lee Lippincott became her mentor. She graduated with high honors in 1966. The following year she married Andrew Faber, a fellow Swarthmore physics student.

She went on to graduate work at Harvard, spending time in Washington working with astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford.
Her first day of observing at a telescope did not go to plan. A malfunctioning instrument fell off the telescope and injured her.

She went back.
In 1972 she joined Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz. She was the first woman on its staff.

Student. Observer. Then a staff of one.
Her early work focused on elliptical galaxies, the smooth, rounded collections of billions of stars. She measured how fast the stars inside them were moving.
In 1976, with her graduate student Robert Jackson, she published a finding that would carry both their names.

Here is what most people miss: the Faber–Jackson relation is named for a professor and her student, side by side. The finding was simple to state and powerful to use. The faster the stars move inside an elliptical galaxy, the brighter the galaxy shines overall. Measure the speed of its stars, and you can estimate how bright it truly is, and from that, how far away it lies. Jackson's name has traveled with hers through astronomy textbooks ever since.

That was only the beginning of her questions.
The galaxies did not behave as visible matter alone could explain. Faber and her colleagues helped build the now-widely-accepted picture of galaxies sitting inside vast, invisible halos of what astronomers call cold dark matter.

In the 1980s, she joined six other astronomers in a long collaboration. Their colleagues nicknamed them the Seven Samurai.
For eight years, they measured the sizes and motions of about 400 galaxies.

The numbers showed something unexpected. Our part of the universe was not just expanding outward evenly. Whole groups of galaxies, including our own, were being drawn toward one region of space, partly hidden behind the dust of the Milky Way.
They named the source of that pull the Great Attractor.

Through the 1980s and beyond, she also helped build the instruments that made such work possible. She co-chaired the science steering committee for the first instruments on the giant Keck I telescope in Hawaii. Later she led the development of DEIMOS, a Keck instrument that spreads the faint light of very distant galaxies into spectra.

And once Hubble could see clearly, she put it to work. She led the Nuker Team, which used Hubble to search for supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

Recognition followed. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985. She received the Bruce Medal in 2012. In February 2013, President Barack Obama presented her with the National Medal of Science.

Four hundred galaxies. Eight years of careful measurement by seven people. Together they showed that our own galaxy is being drawn through space toward something much larger.
If you have ever had to tell people that something important was broken, knowing it would help them fix it, you already know what those blurry pictures carried.

High on Mount Hamilton, above San Jose, the domes of Lick Observatory still stand where she became its first woman on staff. Far beyond them, an asteroid catalogued as 283277 Faber carries her name around the Sun.

Two fingers on each hand curled in the air.
The host was making quotation marks as he described his guest as a "serious actress."
She stopped him and asked what he meant by the quotes.
Her name was Helen Mirren.
She was around 30.

The show was Parkinson, one of the most popular talk shows on British television. The host, Michael Parkinson, had interviewed some of the biggest names in the world.

It was 1975. Mirren was already an accomplished stage actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She was preparing to play Lady Macbeth.

The interview was meant to be about her career.
It did not start that way.
Parkinson opened by reading out remarks from theatre critics. Several of them had spent as much time on her body as on her acting.

Then he asked his question.
Did she find, he wondered, that her "equipment" got in the way of her ambition to be a serious actress?
She asked him to explain exactly what he meant.
He tried again. Her physical attributes. Her figure.

Then she answered.
Was he saying, she asked, that serious actresses can't have big bosoms?

He replied that it might detract from the performance.
She disagreed, calmly, and said that if people were more interested in an actress's body than in her work, that said more about the performance than about her.

The audience watched. The cameras kept rolling. She stayed in her seat and kept her composure.

Decades later, she admitted she had been terrified.
She also said that at the time, she was the one who was criticized for the exchange, not him. In the 1970s, she said, that was simply how things were.

Here is what most people miss: Mirren's view of that night did not stay frozen in 1975. For years, she spoke about it with open anger. When she appeared on his show again, around three decades later, to promote her film The Queen, she told him with a smile that she had hated him. Parkinson, for his part, never apologized and said he did not see what he had done wrong. Then, in 2023, after his death, Mirren told Radio Times that in some ways he had been right. Her physicality, she said, really had made it harder for her to be taken seriously as a classical actress. She had not changed her mind about the question. She had kept thinking about it.

The career that followed answered the question better than any reply on the night.

She played Detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, one of the most respected police dramas in British television. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. She was made a Dame.

She went on working steadily for decades, in theatre, film and television, through her fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond.
Thirty years separated the young actress who was asked about her figure from the woman who came back to the same chat show as an Oscar contender.

She had not needed to win the argument on the night. She had needed to keep working.
If you have ever kept your composure while someone talked past what you were actually saying, you already know what Helen Mirren carried.

The BBC footage of that 1975 interview still exists. In it, a young actress waits for the host to finish, then asks him to say what he means.

The hatch above his seat was wide open.
Below him, the Earth turned slowly past. His upper body was outside the spacecraft. His feet were still planted on the seat inside.
He had a list of jobs to do. Mount a camera. Set up an experiment. Fix a handrail in place.

In the middle of it all, he pointed his camera back at himself.
He told Mission Control he was raising his visor so he could smile.
Then he took the picture.
His name was Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.

He was 36.

The date was November 12, 1966. He and commander Jim Lovell were flying Gemini XII, the last mission of NASA's Gemini program.
The photograph shows his face inside the helmet, a film camera in the foreground, and the curve of the Earth behind him. Aldrin would later call it the first space selfie.

It is a cheerful picture. The mission behind it was serious.
Gemini existed to prepare for the Moon. Astronauts had to prove they could change orbits, meet another spacecraft, dock with it, and live in space for days at a time.

By late 1966, they had done nearly all of it.
One goal still had not been met.
Working outside the spacecraft.

On the first American spacewalk, in 1965, Ed White made floating in space look easy. But floating is not working.
Later spacewalkers tried to carry out real tasks, and the problems began.

On Gemini IX, Gene Cernan became exhausted and overheated. His visor fogged over.
On Gemini X, Michael Collins had a spacewalk cut short.
On Gemini XI, Dick Gordon became so overheated and tired that a task which took less than a minute in training took him about 30 minutes.

Without anything to brace against, every turn of a wrench pushed the astronaut's whole body the other way.
Gemini XII was NASA's last chance in the program to solve that.
Aldrin was a scuba diver. He believed the answer might be found under water.

Here is what most people miss: the selfie was taken during the easiest part of a carefully planned experiment. For Gemini XII, Aldrin helped pioneer a new kind of training. In a pool near Baltimore, Maryland, he practiced his tasks in a weighted spacesuit, floating neither up nor down, for sessions of more than two hours. Engineers also added many more handholds, footholds and restraint points to the spacecraft and the target vehicle, plus a new waist tether. The stand-up spacewalk on November 12 was the warm-up. The real test came the next day.

Gemini XII had launched from Cape Kennedy on November 11. Earlier that afternoon, an Agena target vehicle had gone into orbit ahead of them. Lovell and Aldrin caught up with it and docked.

On November 12, Aldrin stood up through the hatch for about two and a half hours. He set up a camera to photograph star fields, installed a handrail, and retrieved an experiment. He also took photographs of Earth.
And one photograph of himself.
On November 13, he went all the way out.

Connected to the spacecraft by an umbilical line, he moved along the Gemini and the Agena using the new handholds. He tightened bolts. He worked with tools. He stopped to rest at planned intervals.

Lovell reminded him to take his breaks. Aldrin took them.
This time, the work got done without a struggle.
On November 14, he stood up through the hatch one last time.

Across three outings, Aldrin spent 5 hours and 30 minutes working in space. No one had ever spent that long outside a spacecraft.
On November 15, Gemini XII splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, guided home by its computer. A helicopter carried the two astronauts to the recovery ship USS Wasp.

The Gemini program was complete.
What Aldrin proved in those five and a half hours went straight into the Apollo program. Apollo crews adopted the underwater training methods. According to NASA, it became the primary way the United States, Russia and China train for spacewalks.

Less than three years later, in July 1969, Aldrin followed Neil Armstrong down the ladder of the lunar module onto the surface of the Moon.

Many remember him for that day.
But the work that helped make it possible started in a swimming pool in Maryland, and in a quiet orbit above the Earth, where one tired astronaut paused long enough to smile for his own camera.
If you have ever practiced something for months so that, on the day it mattered, it looked easy, you already know what Buzz Aldrin carried.

The Gemini XII capsule is part of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum collection. The photograph is preserved in NASA's archive, Earth still curving behind him.